


Schroedinger's Spy

by pprfaith



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), James Bond (Movies), James Bond - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, As We All Should, Blurb, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, F/M, Gen, I Don't Even Know, Ignores SPECTRE, Introspection, James Bond is a Sad Homicidal Puppy, Short, maybe? - Freeform, old soldiers, pre-slash?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-30
Updated: 2018-04-30
Packaged: 2019-04-30 08:07:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14492565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: James Bond is dead. James Bond is alive.





	Schroedinger's Spy

**Author's Note:**

> This happened. I started writing it right after seeing Skyfall for the first time, then forgot about it for a fear years, came back to it and now it's this. 
> 
> I kinda like it, though, so I made it part of FaithKat Clears Out Her Harddrive. Which is a thing now. Deal.
> 
> Concrit welcome.

+

“What the bloody hell are you doing, 007?” Q demands via comms, his voice tinny and full of panic.

James throws a wink at the nearest camera, flicks his earpiece free and leaps into the fight, twenty to one, out-manned and out-gunned, already bleeding from at least two gunshot wounds. 

Q loses control of the hacked surveillance moments later, just as the agent goes down under the onslaught and no matter how much he curses, no matter how much he swears, he can’t find him again. Not inside the building or outside it, not in hospitals and not in morgues. 

Three days after he stops searching, Bond pops up in Q-branch, pristine, smirking. _Alive_.

Resurrection.

+

“Orphans make the best recruits,” M says, her grey hair a pale helmet, her tongue a sharp blade. 

Somehow, their coworkers have gotten it into their heads that they share a bond, something almost familial. A mother for the motherless, a child for the childless. 

Looking at her, Boadicea in a two-thousand-pound power suit, nothing in her eyes but numbers and pragmatism, Bond can’t fathom how they got the idea. 

M isn’t anyone’s mother. She deals in weapons, blunt, sharp, fast, deadly, and weapons only serve one purpose. 

“Take the bloody shot.”

+

He drowns. In that river, swept out to sea, over rocks and dirt, past living things and dying ones, he drowns. 

The water is smooth and cold, the rushing deafening and Vesper holds onto him as he sinks, cradles him the way he never got to cradle her, her hair a tangle around her head and her dress so bright. 

“Put it all on red,” he tells Eve, months, years, lifetimes later, and thinks of Vesper and that dress, of her soft hands and slow, doomed smile. He thinks of the waters of Venice, the riptide under that bridge in Istanbul and the feeling of his lungs shrinking, seizing, expanding. 

He wants to tell Eve _You missed_ , but never does. 

+

He returns to Skyfall to die. 

That’s the truth of it, the simple heart.

He doesn’t go there to fight, to win, to bloody his hands with even more lives taken. He goes, instead, to end it, once and for all, and he takes Her with him because, in their own way, they are symptoms of the same disease, Her and him. 

They come from the shadows, she says. 

Time to return to them. 

Maybe, if he’s on time, they’ll take Tiago with them when they go.

+

Q thinks he’s clever, spindly little boffin, waxing on about relics of bygone ages and battle ships left to rust and rot. 

He has no idea of the wars James has waged, the lives he’s taken. 

The first one comes hardest, but all the ones after that… he’d lost count, by the time he met Vesper, and there have been twice as many since. Years are an arbitrary measure of time to a man who, most often, doesn’t know the day of the week. He measures instead, in blood spilt and lives taken, missions fulfilled, losses counted.

He slips once, seven missions after M in a cold grave. 

Over comms, Q asks, “When was the last time you slept, 007?”

He almost sounds worried. It’s adorable. 

And Bond answers, truthfully, “Nine bodies ago.”

The boy chokes on his tea. “That’s hardly appropriate, Bond,” he snaps as soon as his airways are cleared.

“Appropriate?” he echoes, torn between horror and amusement because the boy is so, so _young_.

A moment later, the door to his hotel room explodes inward and the number’s up to thirteen before he finds a safe nook to curl up in and cat nap for a moment. 

Q keeps watch.

+

Give me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.

That’s how the saying goes. 

Every time Bond hears it – and he hears it often, for some reason – he feels shortchanged. He’s no hero, gets the tragedy anyway, and even that’s not a very good one. 

Drowned love and needy country. So clichéd. 

He tells Moneypenny that, at some point, pissed off his head on vodka, because somehow this has become something they do. Get drunk together. It’s almost like having a friend, except the friend killed him once, and he’s afraid of ruining her every time he touches her. 

Still, he says, “It seems terribly unfair.”

Just for the irony of it, of him, him of all people, bringing fairness into play.

And Eve looks at him with dark eyes that shine with all the ways she’s smarter than him. She’ll never end up with calluses from murdering too many people. She’s got her four inch heels, a desk and a comfortably ergonomic chair. She rules from M’s office, in his name, and the world has no idea. Bright girl. 

She opens her mouth to say something, thinks better of it and pats him on the shoulder with something like a sigh on her lips. 

+

Half the women he sleeps with have Vesper’s name, still. All of them have her face. 

+

“Skyfall,” they asked.

“Done,” he answered. 

Standing in the ruins of his childhood home, nothing but ashes and broken fragments of stone, he’s surprised to know he told the truth, for once. 

There’s barely anything left; the chapel where M lay next to his parents, if only for one night. The barn, one side singed. The twisted wreck of his car. Kincade, the same as he has always been, his hand warm on James’ shoulder. 

“What’re you going to do, boy?”

He kicks idly at what might have been part of the mantel in the dining room, once. Shrugs. “Nothing.”

He destroys. If anything is ever rebuilt in his wake, he’s doesn’t see it. 

“Aye,” the old man nods. “Maybe that’s best.”

“You’ll be alright?” he asks.

Kincade nods again, stomps his Wellies once against the cold. “Of course.”

They never see each other again.

+

Bond drowns and dies and destroys, kills people with guns Q makes him and hands so calloused with scar tissue, he almost convinces himself he can’t feel the warm stickiness of blood on them anymore. 

Almost, because of course, of course, the world’s best bloody liar can’t manage to lie to himself. 

If he could, he thinks, he could convince himself that he hates all of this, that he wants to get away, truly away. Can convince himself that it’s the returning that’s the hard part after yet another death, another month spent nameless and faceless and drunk between missions, between lives. 

But it’s not. 

He returns, every single time, not out of duty, or loyalty, but simply because a man like him, murder in a designer suit, has no idea what to do with his hands when they aren’t wrapped around a gun. 

Death is what he knows, the only thing he has known for longer than anyone wants to remember.

“Everything he touches,” Dominic Greene says, “seems to wither and die,” and the funny part is that he says it like it’s some sort of secret. 

+

“That’s a shitty hobby, by the way,” Q tells him one night, after too much tea and too many close shaves.

“What is?”

“Resurrection.”

Over the open line, he can almost hear the agent’s small, bland smile. “Pottery didn’t suit me, Quartermaster.”

Q hums, amused, and sips his tea. Two thousand miles away, Bond breaks a man’s neck from behind, never even seeing his face. 

“Take a left at the next chance,” Q orders. 

Bond salutes a traffic camera and absently sucks blood off his knuckles as he runs. 

+

+


End file.
